Kelly WandWhy I (and Therefore No One) Didn't See "Speed Racer": An Open Letter to Media Conglomerates
June 8th 2008 05:15
On May 2, 2008, “Iron Man,” a movie about a third-string superhero that primarily featured a middle-aged actor who’s never once had a hit movie putting on armor suits inside first a cave and then a garage for the better part of 90 minutes opened to over a hundred million dollars.
The following week, “Speed Racer,” a movie sporting a much younger actor, a much greater budget, a softer rating, and more famous directors, bombed so hugely that all the entertainment reporters reporting about its bombing made more that week-end than the movie itself. And not apparently because the movie stank; many blockbusters that stink have at least okay opening week-ends, then show a cataclysmic drop-off once audience word of odor gets around. It certainly couldn’t have stunk more than “Ghost Rider,” and that loaf made a bundle.
Doubtless “Speed Racer”’s already gone down in the halls of Warner Bros. if not the world entire as a failure of marketing, and perhaps it was, but only to the extent that very few people wanted to see it, regardless of its pedigree. The bean counters themselves likely blamed Hirsch, or the Wachowskis, just as they blamed Scarlett Johansson for “The Island,” and the whole experience will be written off as a one-time “branding” glitch in an otherwise perfectly calibrated machine of corporate packaging and metadata saturation techniques.
The cruel, short truth, though, is simply that no one wanted to see a “Speed Racer” movie. Not kids, not fans of the cartoon, not stoners. Chicks didn’t want to see it because chicks don’t care about computer-generated race-cars, they care about shoes. (Guys, being masculine, care about socks.) Chicks probably like the Hirsch kid, but not all squeaky-clean and wearing a round helmet and pretending to drive in a white suit for two hours. Look at it from the other side: guys wouldn’t want to watch Katherine Heigl pretending to drive for two hours unless the “suit” consisted exclusively of gloves and heels and the car was a stick shift. (Actually, maybe chicks would’ve liked that as well, since heels are a type of shoe.)
I should’ve been the target audience for “Speed Racer.” I like trippy visuals*. I watched “Speed Racer” as a kid. Whenever I open the newspaper, the first articles I look for are ones about car-crashes in ice-caves. But at no time as a kid while watching the cartoon in reruns nor at any time since did the desire ever cross my mind for a live-action version of what I was seeing. It would be like trying to picture sex with a live-action Barbi. And I learn from my mistakes.
When my friend who likes everything was unrelentingly twisting my arm to see “Speed”, I pointed out that nothing in the trailers I’d seen gave me the slightest vibe of the old show, which was my only shaky anchorage to begin with. “It’s not supposed to,” he explained. “Those are for kids.” Well, kids didn’t bite either. Eventually he saw it without me (and loved it) and chastened me for not seeing it. He claimed that by my not seeing it, I wasn’t paying my nerd dues. That now thanks to my negligence, studios might never make a Doc Savage movie, A Princess of Mars, A Game of Thrones, etc.
But the truth is, I don’t really care if I see any of those adaptations either. I might, if they make them, but I just don’t get excited the way my friend does when he hears they’re adapting something that we both read back in our teens. Because I know what the best-cases scenario is, and it’s that I won’t feel violated like I did after “The Time Machine” and “League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.” The best an adaptation can be is just a heavily compromised, necessarily neutered interpretation of the real deal. That’s what film development is: taking unfilmable ideas and diluting them for mainstream consumption. And very few memorable works were designed to successfully withstand that gelding. My friend was right: studios aren’t trying to woo picky jerks like me, they’re wooing everybody. They’re cashing in on brand-name recognition. We all know this going in, and we tailor our expectations automatically. Only a fool goes into a modern summer blockbuster expecting to be catered to more than the twelve-year-old sitting in front of him.
I’d already seen “Speed” in the best format it could ever exist in, hurky-jerky 1960’s anime. What marketing types inherently fail to grasp is that the show’s cheapness, its silliness, was endemic to its appeal. They can’t wrap their brains around this. To them, more expensive-looking equals better, in every instance.
Even now, the cameras are almost set to roll on Peter Berg’s “Dune,” adapted from a book (again from the ‘60’s) whose prose so arid that if adapted even remotely faithfully won’t “play” at all. David Lynch tried, the Sci Fi Channel tried, who knows, maybe third time’s the charm. Most people I know wouldn’t be able to finish the book. But they’re the target audience, not me, because there’s a lot, lot more of them. Undoubtedly pricy reboots of “Friday the 13th” and “Nightmare on Elm Street” are also on the drawing-boards, even though a crappy attempt to rehash/wed both series came out only five years ago. Are the people who saw “Freddy vs. Jason” in 2003 still the target audience or is it their teenage kids this time? A million brilliant unproduced scripts cluttering Hollywood vaults, and already they’re strip-mining the ‘80’s. Not to mention the ‘00’s.
Even sooner, a massively-budgeted version of “Get Smart” opens next week, based on yet another ‘60’s show I admired, offering today’s young audiences a shiny CG version of the American spy spoof genre, only with Evan Almighty instead of Don Adams, Leslie Nielsen, Eddie Murphy, Rowan Atkinson, or even Roger Moore, Peter Sellers, or James Coburn for that matter. The trailers suggest it’s packed with expensive special effects, ball-crunching vehicular-explosive action sequences, and the Rock. None of which are inherently hilarious if you think about it.
Studio executives, here’s an easy yardstick you might find helpful: the occasional “Ghostbusters” notwithstanding, the more a production costs, the less funny it’ll be. Example: “Borat” cost about three cents. Put another way, it’s practically impossible to be funny on anything more than a shoe-phone budget.
Since I realize this formula goes so much against your grain, though, how about this: a 2009 remake of 2008’s “Speed Racer”? Just make sure you don’t cast Scarlett Johansson. Males 18-39 obviously loathe her.
* When I asked a friend of mine involved in its postproduction how it looked, he replied, "Like a tranny threw up."
The following week, “Speed Racer,” a movie sporting a much younger actor, a much greater budget, a softer rating, and more famous directors, bombed so hugely that all the entertainment reporters reporting about its bombing made more that week-end than the movie itself. And not apparently because the movie stank; many blockbusters that stink have at least okay opening week-ends, then show a cataclysmic drop-off once audience word of odor gets around. It certainly couldn’t have stunk more than “Ghost Rider,” and that loaf made a bundle.
Doubtless “Speed Racer”’s already gone down in the halls of Warner Bros. if not the world entire as a failure of marketing, and perhaps it was, but only to the extent that very few people wanted to see it, regardless of its pedigree. The bean counters themselves likely blamed Hirsch, or the Wachowskis, just as they blamed Scarlett Johansson for “The Island,” and the whole experience will be written off as a one-time “branding” glitch in an otherwise perfectly calibrated machine of corporate packaging and metadata saturation techniques.
The cruel, short truth, though, is simply that no one wanted to see a “Speed Racer” movie. Not kids, not fans of the cartoon, not stoners. Chicks didn’t want to see it because chicks don’t care about computer-generated race-cars, they care about shoes. (Guys, being masculine, care about socks.) Chicks probably like the Hirsch kid, but not all squeaky-clean and wearing a round helmet and pretending to drive in a white suit for two hours. Look at it from the other side: guys wouldn’t want to watch Katherine Heigl pretending to drive for two hours unless the “suit” consisted exclusively of gloves and heels and the car was a stick shift. (Actually, maybe chicks would’ve liked that as well, since heels are a type of shoe.)
I should’ve been the target audience for “Speed Racer.” I like trippy visuals*. I watched “Speed Racer” as a kid. Whenever I open the newspaper, the first articles I look for are ones about car-crashes in ice-caves. But at no time as a kid while watching the cartoon in reruns nor at any time since did the desire ever cross my mind for a live-action version of what I was seeing. It would be like trying to picture sex with a live-action Barbi. And I learn from my mistakes.
When my friend who likes everything was unrelentingly twisting my arm to see “Speed”, I pointed out that nothing in the trailers I’d seen gave me the slightest vibe of the old show, which was my only shaky anchorage to begin with. “It’s not supposed to,” he explained. “Those are for kids.” Well, kids didn’t bite either. Eventually he saw it without me (and loved it) and chastened me for not seeing it. He claimed that by my not seeing it, I wasn’t paying my nerd dues. That now thanks to my negligence, studios might never make a Doc Savage movie, A Princess of Mars, A Game of Thrones, etc.
But the truth is, I don’t really care if I see any of those adaptations either. I might, if they make them, but I just don’t get excited the way my friend does when he hears they’re adapting something that we both read back in our teens. Because I know what the best-cases scenario is, and it’s that I won’t feel violated like I did after “The Time Machine” and “League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.” The best an adaptation can be is just a heavily compromised, necessarily neutered interpretation of the real deal. That’s what film development is: taking unfilmable ideas and diluting them for mainstream consumption. And very few memorable works were designed to successfully withstand that gelding. My friend was right: studios aren’t trying to woo picky jerks like me, they’re wooing everybody. They’re cashing in on brand-name recognition. We all know this going in, and we tailor our expectations automatically. Only a fool goes into a modern summer blockbuster expecting to be catered to more than the twelve-year-old sitting in front of him.
I’d already seen “Speed” in the best format it could ever exist in, hurky-jerky 1960’s anime. What marketing types inherently fail to grasp is that the show’s cheapness, its silliness, was endemic to its appeal. They can’t wrap their brains around this. To them, more expensive-looking equals better, in every instance.
Even now, the cameras are almost set to roll on Peter Berg’s “Dune,” adapted from a book (again from the ‘60’s) whose prose so arid that if adapted even remotely faithfully won’t “play” at all. David Lynch tried, the Sci Fi Channel tried, who knows, maybe third time’s the charm. Most people I know wouldn’t be able to finish the book. But they’re the target audience, not me, because there’s a lot, lot more of them. Undoubtedly pricy reboots of “Friday the 13th” and “Nightmare on Elm Street” are also on the drawing-boards, even though a crappy attempt to rehash/wed both series came out only five years ago. Are the people who saw “Freddy vs. Jason” in 2003 still the target audience or is it their teenage kids this time? A million brilliant unproduced scripts cluttering Hollywood vaults, and already they’re strip-mining the ‘80’s. Not to mention the ‘00’s.
Even sooner, a massively-budgeted version of “Get Smart” opens next week, based on yet another ‘60’s show I admired, offering today’s young audiences a shiny CG version of the American spy spoof genre, only with Evan Almighty instead of Don Adams, Leslie Nielsen, Eddie Murphy, Rowan Atkinson, or even Roger Moore, Peter Sellers, or James Coburn for that matter. The trailers suggest it’s packed with expensive special effects, ball-crunching vehicular-explosive action sequences, and the Rock. None of which are inherently hilarious if you think about it.
Studio executives, here’s an easy yardstick you might find helpful: the occasional “Ghostbusters” notwithstanding, the more a production costs, the less funny it’ll be. Example: “Borat” cost about three cents. Put another way, it’s practically impossible to be funny on anything more than a shoe-phone budget.
Since I realize this formula goes so much against your grain, though, how about this: a 2009 remake of 2008’s “Speed Racer”? Just make sure you don’t cast Scarlett Johansson. Males 18-39 obviously loathe her.
* When I asked a friend of mine involved in its postproduction how it looked, he replied, "Like a tranny threw up."
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Comment by Cibbuano
20/20 Filmsight
Science News
Hunt Famous
Orble Post of the Day
Fat Cult
Techbreak
Comment by Kelly Wand
Sprocket Holed
Comment by Bethany
Comment by Damo
For the Sake of Argument
My Apologetics
Now it looks lame.
The later version even lamer
It hasn't been around for so many years so I could call this a pet self indulgence by Hollywood.
All the reviews say it was the most boring film for kids ever.
Comment by Bryn
Horrorphile
They're re-booting G-Force (Battle of the Planets) at the moment. I'm not holding my breath. I loved the show as a kid (albeit the American dubbed version that showed on tv down under in the early 80s), but I just can't see a big screen live action version working at all. Look what happened to the dreadful live action version of Thunderbirds ....
What I would love to see though is a live action feaure based on the 2000 AD post-apocalypse strip "Strontium Dog", which was always more popular among my friends and I rather than the "Judge Dread" ...